Vim on Miek Gieben

Vim live preview (sort of)

Wed, 08 Oct 2014 22:40:00 +0000

When editing Markdown files or internet drafts in Pandoc’s Markdown, I wanted to see some live preview window. I looked around a bit, but the solutions presented on the Internet, seemed to be insufficient, either to clumsy or don’t work at all.

My usual routine is: edit -> write -> make -> reload “rendered” file.

Turns out you can automate most of this. Vim has a feature: --servername <id> which allows you to send commands to another vim instance using that <id>. So we need two pieces to make this work.

vim and editing pandoc2rfc

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:27:00 +0000

… or any other document format for that matter.

I thought it might be nice to have some sort of split window view in that allows you to edit a Pandoc file on the left and see the generated I-D on the right (in vim, with no extra daemons and not relying on inotify).

Turns out you can do that, though it is not optimal, but it works. The jury is still out if this works well enough to actually make it useful.

Vim as MANPAGER

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 18:59:00 +0000

I like Vim, so I try to use it at many places. Like in my shell (set -o vi), and when writing and coding.

After some Googling I found that Vim can also be used as a MANPAGER. But there is one nagging issue. To quit viewing the manual page you have to type ‘:q’, which is one keystroke more then when using less as your MANPAGER… Needless to say: this is unacceptable.

Dynamic Syntax Highlighting in Vim

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 09:57:00 +0000

I’m a huge fan of syntax highlighting in my editor Vim. One thing I started to
miss was that user defined type miss out on the highlighting, because Vim does
not know about them. Wouldn’t it be cool to have some sort of automatic support that
detect your types and adds them to the correct highlighting group? I call
this “dynamic syntax highlighting”.

As a proof-of-concept I took the tagbar
plugin, and modified it a little to take advantage of the language detection (specifically the types). The modified code can be found in my fork on github.